When comparing Flask vs TurboGears 2, the Slant community recommends Flask for most people. In the question“What are the best general-purpose Python web frameworks usable in production sites?” Flask is ranked 1st while TurboGears 2 is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Flask is:
Flask is very easy to get up and going, with vanilla HTML or with bootstrap pieces. It doesn't take much lines of Python to load Flask to get headers working, etc, and since it's all modular you don't have to have something you don't want in your application.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Minimalist without losing power
Flask is very easy to get up and going, with vanilla HTML or with bootstrap pieces. It doesn't take much lines of Python to load Flask to get headers working, etc, and since it's all modular you don't have to have something you don't want in your application.
Pro Lots of resources available online
Flask is one of the most popular Python web frameworks, if not the most popular one. As such, there's plenty of guides, tutorials, and libraries available for it. A large number of important Python libraries, such as SQLAlchemy have libraries for Flask, which add valuable bindings to make the development process and the integration between these libraries and Flask as easy as possible.
Pro Extremely easy to build a quick prototype
Even though it's pretty minimalistic out of the box, Flask still provides the necessary tools to build a quick prototype for a web app right after a fresh install. With all the main components pretty much packed in the flask
package, building a simple web app in a single Python file is as easy as it gets.
Pro Very flexible
Flask gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they develop their web applications.
For example, the choice of not having an ORM, but instead choosing one suited to the task, or another area where Flask gives a lot of options to developers is the templating. They can use Jinja2, Flask's default templating language or choose from a number of different templating languages they desire.
Pro Great documentation
The official documentation is very thorough and complete. Everything is explained in-depth and followed by extremely well-explained tutorials that tackle real-world problems.
Pro Able to use ORM or "true SQL"
Pro A powerful and flexible Object Relational Mapper (ORM) with real multi-database support
SQLAlchemy is a powerful ORM which is highly regarded in the Python community. TurboGears' ORM is built with SQLAlchemy, which gives it a great deal of flexibility and power.
Pro Code that is as natural as writing a function
Pro Starts as a microframework and scales up to a fullstack solution
Allows developers to build quick, simple web prototypes or scale up to create complex web applications.
Pro Support for Horizontal data partitioning (aka, sharding)
TurboGears allows for horizontal data partitioning, which allows the division of logical datatabases into smaller elements.
Pro Built in extensibility Pluggable Applications and standard WSGI components
Allows for creating extendable Pluggable Applications which extend the framework itself through endpoints provided by TurboGears.
Pro Validated and compile time checked template engine
The template engine is XHTML based and so is validated for errors when compiled to HTML. You will never serve a broken page again due to a forgotten close tag
Pro Aims for a flexible design
TurboGears2 does not get in your way on how to design your applications, classes etc.
Cons
Con Not async-friendly
Flask is explicitly not designed to handle async programming.
Con Setting up a large project requires some previous knowledge of the framework
Setting up a large project with Flask is not that easy considering how there's no "official" way of doing it. Blueprints are a useful tool in this regard but require some additional reading and are a bit tricky to get right for a beginner.
The lack of some defaults can also be problematic. Having to choose between different libraries for a certain task is never easy, especially if you have never worked with Flask before.
Con Threadlocals and globals used everywhere
The default way of creating applications in flask makes it hard to use reusable and clean code.
Con HTML-oriented, not API-oriented
Not necessarily designed for making APIs, though that is possible
Con The great extensibility can feel overwhelming
Sometimes TurboGears' extensibility and feeling of having different options for doing a single thing can feel overwhelming and as if writing everything from scratch.
Con small community
